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Planned vs Reactive Deloads/Exercise Breaks

Method Health
Oct 25, 2020
6 min read

Updated: Oct 20

What happens to your aerobic fitness, strength and muscle during breaks from regular exercises, and what can you do about it?


Every physically active person has or will encounter a period in which external conflicts limit the time available for exercise. Personal conflicts, injury, family commitments, caring for an ill family member, extended travel, or time commitments for personal or business reasons that limit time availability for regular exercise.


Some common questions we receive from clients regarding deload periods:

  • “I am going away on holiday. What can I do to prevent losing all my fitness, muscle, and strength from exercise?”

  • “Will I lose all my gains if I take a break from exercise?”

  • “What can I do during this injury to minimise aerobic fitness and strength reductions”

  • "I have a planned or are experiencing an unplanned surgery or hospital stay, what should I expect and will getting active sooner help?"



Every physically active person has or will encounter a period in which external conflicts limit the time available for exercise. Personal conflicts, injury, family commitments, caring for an ill family member, extended travel, or time commitments for personal or business reasons that limit time availability for regular exercise. Overall, If you have been completing consistent weekly exercise training for more than a year, it would take many weeks of doing very little physical activity (e.g., hospital-based bed rest) to significantly reduce previously made progress in aerobic fitness, muscle mass, strength, and power. If you are on a 3-4 week holiday and staying active by walking a lot and occasionally lifting heavy things (like your suitcase), you will likely either maintain all your exercise gains, or it will only take 1-3 weeks of continuing your previous exercise routine to regain what changed during your holiday. If you do not want to sustain large reductions in your well-earnt exercise gains during breaks but can’t train as much as usual, when you do train, make sure your intensity is high, even if the time spent training or weekly frequency is reduced, to maintain your aerobic fitness, muscle, and strength. Complete rest, such as from hospital-based bed rest or injury that results in joint bracing (broken bone or large joint or tendon injury) or non-weight-bearing (wheelchair or crutches), results in more significant reductions and longer periods needed to improve again. However, some form of exercise during these periods while recovering has a significant protective effect of reducing “losses.” Let's expand for those who want more nuance.



What about injury risk and health reductions after deloads or breaks from exercise?



This section is for the context of having an injury, pain, restricted to a hospital for multiple days to months, or you have been prescribed a medical joint bracing/casting, where in each context previous levels of exercise will not be tolerable or achievable? 


Pain with or without an injury: Often, pain-related avoidance of regular movement, often to try and protect from expected pain increase during movement, causes more muscle and strength loss than an injury itself. The sooner you can increase your levels of physical activity, the less likely a significant reduction in strength and muscle will occur and might also help your pain resolve as well (Relationship between Physical Activity and Pain in Adults). Talk to one of our physiotherapists about modifying exercise rather than stopping exercise altogether around an injury as there are very few conditions where some type of exercise is not helpful for supporting the recovery from an injury or improving pain.


Protocols that cause joint or limb casting (where you cannot move or strain the joint at all) for longer than two weeks do cause significant changes in strength and muscle mass such as a 5% reduction in muscle size every 2 weeks in this bracing study (Omega‐3 fatty acid supplementation attenuates skeletal muscle disuse atrophy). These inevitable changes with bracing emphasises the importance of 

  1. Practising regular injury or re-injury risk reduction strategies (like adequate sports training, exercise, stress management, and consistently high quality sleep) 

  2. Resistance training to ensure your “muscle scaffolding” is present to maintain a higher base in case you need a brace or time away from resistance training. This could be called a “strength reserve” and protects you from having unplanned disuse (injury, illness or hospital visits) or aging (an effect of 0.5-2% reduction in muscle and strength per year after 30 years old if you never exercise) being as impactful (see images below)

  3. Exercising the joints above and below the injured area as tolerable to maintain muscle around the braced joint. For example, if you have had elbow cast for a bony elbow injury prescribed for 3 weeks, training the wrist and the shoulder muscles as able would be helpful when recovering the elbow joint post cast removal.

    • Through the mechanism of “cross-education” or training the opposite to the affected joint to maintain some exercise adaptations. This method is driven by maintaining the nervous system and systemic hormonal signals released across the whole body when exercising any muscle that supports strength and muscle maintenance of the injured limb. Effective “cross-education” involves high-intensity strength training of the unaffected limb, which can reduce up to 20-30% of strength losses that might have been seen on the affected side associated with bracing or casting an injured joint.



Even in hospitals, early “mobilisation” and bedside or in-bed exercise, compared to bed rest, is supported by doctors, nurses, and all other hospital staff to improve medical outcomes and rate of recovery from most reasons for the time in the hospital. Here are some examples of the encouragement to start exercising sooner then you might think when recovering from:


Having lots of muscle and strength prior to these events is helpful due to being a big reserve you can rely on when recovering from illness or surgical set-backs



What about nutrition to reduce the affects of a break from regular exercise? 


Now, in case you missed it, some relevant links are here:


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